Five Reasons BitNami Makes Your Life Easier

If you’re not already familiar with BitNami, the aim of the project is to help spread the adoption of open source software by making it easier than ever to install and configure. Whether you’re an experienced techie or a total newbie, you’ll be able to get open source applications installed in just minutes with our easy to use installers. Still not convinced? Read on for 5 reasons BitNami will make your life easier.

1.- A wide variety of great applications

BitNami provides a diverse catalog of Open Source applications for both personal and business use. BitNami-packaged applications range from wikis and blogging software to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software. In addition to the application
stacks, several development stacks are available for languages such as PHP, JRuby ,Ruby and Python. BitNami currently offers 30 ready-to-run, open
source software stacks, and we’re constantly adding more. You can vote for
your favorite application to be packaged in our polls.

2.- Easy to install.

One of the greatest benefits of the BitNami Stacks is that they are
incredibly easy to install. Even if you are not very technical, you can have
a BitNami Stack up and running in just a few mouse clicks. All of the installation and configuration steps are completely automated for each BitNami Stack. All you have to do is answer a few simple questions, click ‘Next’ and ‘Finish’. Don’t believe us? Try it for yourself! Download the BitNami Stack for your favorite application and take it for a spin.

Uninstalling the Stacks is just as easy as installing them. Just run the uninstaller and your system will be right back to the way it was pre-install.

3.- Choice of deployment method: A native, self-contained distribution, a modular platform or in the cloud.

BitNami Stacks are available in three different formats:

Stacks: BitNami Stacks are completely self-contained and run independently
of the rest of the software or libraries installed on your system. So, you don’t have to worry about installing dependencies on your system to make the new application work, because the Stack already includes everything you need to run it. They also won’t interfere with any other software installed on your system, so everything you’re already running will continue to work normally.

Modules: BitNami Modules give you the added benefit of being able to install
several applications on top of a single infrastructure (Apache+MySQL+PHP) stack. This makes it much more efficient to run multiple BitNami-packaged applications on the same machine. It also makes it possible to share user and system data across applications and have a centralized point of control over what software is installed and running on your system.

Cloud: Even if you prefer to run your software on top of a third-party’s
infrastructure, such as EC2, BitNami has a solution for you. We’ve partnered
with Rightscale to allow you to deploy a BitNami Stack to Amazon’s EC2 in just one click. You can now launch, monitor, and manage your BitNami Stack instances on multiple servers with Rightscale’s easy to use GUI. All you pay for is your compute time on Amazon – and Rightscale even gives you 10 free
hours to get started! Visit http://www.bitnami.org/rightscale to learn more.

4.- Use the Same Stack for Evaluation, Development and Deployment

The ease of installing and uninstall apps makes BitNami Stacks ideal for
evaluating new applications, but they are also meant for both development and production use. BitNami Stacks are great for development because you can
install and run several instances of the same stack on a single machine makes, and we work hard to make sure they are stable enough for deployment into production. The fact that you can run the same BitNami Stack across all of these different environments makes it very easy to maintain consistency, which saves you from losing time tracking down issues due to small variations in stacks across environments. The BitNami project is all about making your life easier!

5.- Community.

The BitNami Stacks are released under the Apache 2.0 license and can be downloaded and used freely. There’s plenty of support available via the BitNami forums, where suggestions for improvements to the project are always
welcome. If you have questions, compliments, ideas or suggestions for improvement, please stop by the forums and let us know.